My father's day advice is to actually get a meaningful and restorative apology before you let your parent back into your life. Today sucks for me a whole lot more because I didn't just listen to my 18 year old self and kept that coward cut off.
I gave up what my gut was telling me for a concept of peace centered around him never changing and never being wrong, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. All his little cruel tendencies were excused away by this faux peace, "That's just who he is. At least he loves us lolol."
Except that love is a powerful, unmistakable action that requires sacrifice, none greater than the one assumed by a parent. And I'm left really wondering when has Waddell Leon Johnson III has ever really sacrificed anything for me. Certainly never pride, the sin he refuses to face. He didn't come see me after my knee surgery. He didn’t celebrate my milestones without having to be told to. He's accomplished nothing of note outside of co-creating my brother (a truly great father btw) but always had so many thoughts about what I should do with my already far more successful life*. He hasn't watched or read a single thing I've created. And in the last few years of this tenuous peace treaty, my body realized way before my mind and heart did that he had stopped asking about me in general, had absolutely no interest at all about how my life was going at all.
But you learn to excuse that shit away. That's just who he is.
Well yeah sis, that's the problem.
18 year old Jasmine knew what the fuck was up as soon as he told her “I have a new family now" 14 years after co-creating mine. But I didn't have these words for it and this wordlessness left me unequipped to negotiate a better peace treaty. I was raised to heal my parents first, so that's what I did. And now I'm stuck alone, left to work even harder to heal myself once again.
*That’s not a brag mind you, that’s just a quantifiable statement of fact. I never would have weaponized such a fact like this if he hadn't written a poorly crafted letter last year dismissing all I've done first. The letter was several pages because, again, I've accomplished a lot.
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